


Flight of the Skyfish

by inatheblue



Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventure, Airships, Fantasy, Gen, Magic punk, Miyazaki vibes, Science Fantasy, Terraforming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-04
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-07 17:11:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19089451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inatheblue/pseuds/inatheblue
Summary: Daria's father is a wizard. Or, rather, he's an engineer using technology and magic, which is forbidden by the Twin Gods Order and punished with death. Once, engineers had ruled this realm, they were, however, overthrown by the rise of an anti-science cult. Will Daria and her father be able to hide from the priests? Or will they be able to find a safe place for their own?





	1. Chapter 1

Daria's father was a wizard and it was forbidden to speak about it.

By the day he worked in the smithy, fixing horseshoes, scythes, and blades. His steel was one of the best in the countryside, and sometimes people would even come from the surrounding villages to pay handsomely for his expertise. Strangely, father had tried to tone the rumors down, not content at all about his reputation. He preferred spending his life in solitude, had avoided crowds, rarely visited town and when he did, he made his business fast and never spent time on frivolities. Other people from the village thought him a grumpy craftsmaster, who wanted perhaps to keep the tricks of his trade to himself.

When Daria was a little kid, she thought father was just boring. Gradually she had learned the truth. Laurent the blacksmith had secrets to hide, far more dangerous than his knowledge of metalworking.

She had discovered it about the same time when she had started to watch her father's workshop more closely. She was perhaps six or seven when she had noticed that not everything that was produced in the smithy looked like farmer's tools, and some alloys had an odd tint. Father worked with these in the evenings after he closed the smithy to the visitors.

"No one can know." - he had told her as soon as she could understand. - "Our life depends on it."

He frowned, then, as if reminded of something.

"You've been able to read on your own for some time now." - he mused. - "You could start helping out. The earlier the better, I'd say, especially these days."

And so Daria became an apprentice in the forbidden art of engineer magic.

Laurent's house had a cellar, and everything in there was unusual, starting with a fume hood and a long cupboard full of retorts, rulers and calipers, spirit levels and magnifying glasses, and a whole wide array of tweezers. There were tools for gem cutting, casting molds for different exotic shapes, burners that gave off a blue flame. Now that his daughter was allowed into the secret part of the workshop, the blacksmith found a dusty blackboard and some chalk; then teaching began.

For the first two years, until Laurent made sure that Daria could do her math and follow directions she was not permitted to touch anything. In the third year, supervised by her father, she had crafted a clockwork mechanism on her own. She learned to understand blueprints and work with a map and a compass, although she did not know why she'd needed it yet. She had also watched Laurent when he handled pure geistmetal behind thick glass, through rubber gloves fitted in two holes.

At any time of the day, she had to answer questions such as: if we mix metal A and metal B, what kind of proportions do you need to obtain alloy with desired properties? Or: if the carriage needs to reach city X, how fast should it go? She did not know the purpose of such questions, though she had her suspicions. Once in a while, her father took a backpack filled with newly crafted parts and ventured into the woods. He'd returned without them, all spent, and would close the smithy for the next day to rest.

Everything they had worked on was a secret, but even if father did not stress it often enough, Daria would have enough sense not to mention anything suspicious. They had to visit the village for the supplies, and dad tried his best to be accepted in the community despite his reclusion. So she played with the farmers' children, while he'd trade and exchange news with villagers at the tavern, and they had both attended sermons at the temple. There were no doubts about the Twin Gods Order's attitude to engineering.

"It is an act of black magic." - father Tobias would stress , trying to look somber and instill some healthy fear into his flock (a futile effort, since nobody in the village was afraid of the plump and cordial priest). - "A defiance against the laws of nature. And it is rightly so that the wizards should be imprisoned and burned at the stakes together with their inventions."

She had also no doubt about what the father thought of it.

"Ignorance is a shield made of tin. Tobias is a good man, but he would hand us over to the Grey Coats without blinking an eye. Beliefs and assumptions cloud the judgement. This also applies to us, so please always keep your eyes open. And be patient. If we make enough progress, we'll soon be off to the place where we can live safely, in the open."

So she was patient, secretive and dutiful, and every day more like her father.

In the fourth year of her apprenticeship, a teacher arrived at the village.


	2. The count arrives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Count Diospyros arrives with a guest.

A bobber made of a goose feather, painted red with beetroot dye, drifted ad the water’s surface. Daria gave it a critical look.

“It’s not balanced yet. You need to add another piece of lead” - she said. - “Otherwise you won’t see if a smaller fish reaches for the bait.”

“Who needs the small ones? Big fish is all I care about.” - declared Liam, he listened to the older girl though. He pulled the fishing line out of the water, sat on the pier and proceeded to fix a piece of lead foil underneath the bobber. He bought it from the blacksmith girl for a whole honeycomb, and he was determined to make the fishing rod work. - “I’m going to catch a giant perch with this one, you’ll see. I have a secret bait to lure them.”

“Liam!” - suddenly the pier was resounding with the patter of bare feet. “Liam, mom said you should help me clean these!”

A little girl, yellow haired, freckled and gap-toothed shook the basket full of red-finned roaches.

“She caught them in shallow water, with line and hook only.” - said Liam to Daria. - “That’s cheating. I’m going to have a real fishing rod, Annika. With a lead sinker and everything. And we’ll see who catches supper the next time.”

The girl giggled. “Lead sinker! It’s almost engineering!”

“Wait till father Tobias hears you curse like this..” - started Liam and interrupted. From afar, there was a sound of hoofbeat, three, no, four mounts, and the clatter of wheels. Daria got off the pier, and headed to the road, just in time to notice several armed people escorting a carriage. The mounts had brightly colored scales - red and yellow, unlike the green and grey ones that people kept in the village for plowing, and were noticeably larger. They had hoofboots made of aluminium alloy - Daria saw ones before and was quite sure of it . And the leader of those men, a large, black bearded man rode a real warhorse.  On his breastplate, Daria recognized the coat of arms of House Diospyros.

“It’s the count” - she whispered. - “And he brought here someone.”


End file.
